Pity the late Cedric Ford. If he had understood the way the media worked, he might not have gone on the horrific shooting spree in central Kansas on Thursday that cost three people their lives and fourteen people their health. But alas, once the major media understood the demographics of the case, they lost interest in Ford quicker than you could say “Muhammad and Malvo.”

Ford simply did not fit the narrative. “Who commits mass shootings?” read the headline of an all too typical piece on CNN.com some months ago. CNN’s answer: the “young, white and male.” At 38, Ford was relatively young, and he was certainly male, but he was not white. Ford, in fact, represents the most recent manifestation of a widely underreported phenomenon — the black mass murderer. As in virtually every other case, Ford’s blackness was not an incidental detail. It was at the heart of why he did what he did.